Grocery Fulfillment is Strikingly Manual
Grocery is a collection of vastly different products which make the fulfillment process extremely complicated. Typical ambient goods, chill good and frozen goods have different temperature requirements, and need to be stored in different zones. In fulfillment, certain delicate products (e.g. fresh goods) need either be placed at the top of the pallet/cage or be handled separately.
Cross-docking (also called ‘pick to zero’) is a unique grocery operation. Grocery is composed of durable good (e.g. beverage, cans) and fresh goods. Fresh goods typically require cross-docking operations, which means they get dispatched to store locations directly the same day, without storage in the warehouse. Then before outbound, operators need to consolidate the picked-flow and cross-dock flow together for a grocery store.
Integrated Pick&Sort ™ with Agi. Integrated Pick&Sort ™ is a unique fulfillment process pioneered by Rainbow Dynamics Robotics. It allows operators to ‘pick in batch’ and sort directly at the storage areas to store destinations, powered by Agi. It takes the best of the both worlds, batch- pick allows higher hit-rate and thus high picking efficiency. Sort right at the storage area (in aisles) saves operators the transportation of picked goods to another sorting area.
Auto cross-docking with Agi. Agi makes cross-dock operations easy. With mobile induction stations, it can be put at wherever is deemed convenient, e.g. near the inbound area for easier truck unloading, or near the outbound staging area when all picked goods are already fulfilled.
Ultimate flexibility and agility. The entire Pick&Sort ™ is very flexible as we can design induction, travel route and outbound destinations very flexibly and across the entire warehouse. It is also extremely agile as we can start the operation with a fleet of limited Agi robots but grow throughput by simply adding more Agi robots as business grows.
High-density destination chutes. We designed multi-level high-density chutes in order to increase space utilization in the outbound / palletizing area.